A follow-up to the book "Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism and Science Exposed!" by Robert Todd Carroll, creator of The Skeptic's Dictionary. The blog will offer irregular postings about cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and illusions.

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Monday, February 6, 2012

priming effect

The priming effect is a biasing effect on judgment or action by the
cognitive meaning or emotive aura of memories, words, images, or symbols. Most of us have had an experience where we misheard some words in a song, a prayer, or a pledge and then continued to mishear the same words--sometimes for years--until somebody corrects us. We might call such cases examples of self-priming. (This kind of mishearing is called a mondegreen.) Another example of priming comes from backmasking.
What at first sounds like gibberish becomes a clear message after
somebody tells you what to listen for. Another example of priming
comes from allegedly outraged parents and a talking doll: "Little Mommy
Real Loving Baby Cuddle and Coo" doll from Fisher-Price. Some folks
swear the doll mumbles "Satan is king" and "Islam is the light." Some
might even hear "Palin is a terrorist who is perpetrating voter fraud" once they're told that's what the doll is saying.

A person's prejudices, preoccupations, or vital interests might prime one to mishear or misread words. For example, an evolutionary biologist might misread a headline in a magazine
article as saying that Charles Darwin committed fraud when the headline
actually says that Charles Dawson (of Piltdown infamy) was the
miscreant. Because the headline would strike the
scientist as false, however, a quick review would probably correct the misreading. In most
cases of priming, however, we are unaware of the influence. Many studies have demonstrated that we
are influenced in our judgments and actions both by words themselves and
by the order in which words, images, or statements are presented to us
or which present themselves to us naturally.

Just hearing someone utter the word 'beautiful' before you view a sunset
or a work of art may influence both your judgment and the speed with
which you make the judgment. Psi researcher Daryl Bem tested for precognition
by modifying a standard test of priming. Instead of showing subjects a
word like 'ugly' or 'beautiful' before they viewed a picture of something
like a sunset or a sex act and then testing how long
it takes to respond either favorably or unfavorably to the picture, Bem
showed the picture first, measured response time, and then showed the
"priming word."

Sometimes we see or hear things
without being conscious of seeing or hearing them. Evidence of
unconscious perception may become clear at a later time. For example, a
person may go many years without understanding why seeing a road sign
with the words “hidden meadow” in it produces sexual arousal. Then, one
day she returns to a place she hadn’t been in many years. She remembers
that this was where she met her first lover and the place is called
Hidden Meadow.

Priming has been shown to be powerful enough to create false memories.
Priming is especially problematic in hypnotherapy. Many hypnotherapists
seem unaware that they are priming their patients. The dangers of this
practice are stated by Martin Orne:
"The cues as to what is expected may be unwittingly communicated before
or during the hypnotic procedure, either by the hypnotist or by someone
else, for example, a previous subject, a story, a movie, a stage show,
etc. Further, the nature of these cues may be quite obscure to the
hypnotist, to the subject, and even to the trained observer."

The
priming effect is also evident in the unconscious influence of symbols
and metaphors, as Sigmund Freud noted long ago. There is a reason that
presidents pose for photos while sitting at a desk with a library of
books in the background guarded by a hanging American flag and fronted by
a family photo. A recent study found that a person will usually vote more politically conservative if he or she votes or completes a survey near or in a
church location. "These same voters are also more negative toward non-Christians, as
compared to people who vote or answer polls near government or
non-Christian buildings. Also:

A
study of voting patterns in precincts of Arizona in 2000 showed that
the support for propositions to increase the funding of schools was
significantly greater when the polling station was in a school than when
it was in a nearby location. A separate experiment showed that exposing
people to images of classrooms and school lockers also increased the
tendency of participants to support a school initiative. The effect of
the images was larger than the difference between parents and other
voters! (Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, p. 55, Macmillan, Kindle Edition.)

Pollsters
know, or should know, that they will get different results from a
random sample of adults who are asked if they support affirmative action or preferential treatment of underrepresented groups. Differences in opinion will also occur if the question is put negatively rather than positively. Apparently, opposing something is not understood as the direct opposite of supporting something.

Pollsters
know, or should know, that how people answer a question is affected by
what question or questions were asked previously. That is why
professional pollsters should and usually do have their pollsters ask
the same questions to members of the sample, but ask them in different
orders to different segments of those polled.

Pollsters
know, or should know, that set-up questions can bias the answers to
poll questions. In 1999, when Juanita Broaddrick publicly alleged that
21 years earlier William Jefferson Clinton had acted indecently toward
her, CNN/Gallup/USA and Fox News/Opinion dynamics both polled the
American people about whether they believed her. The CNN/Gallup/USA
Today poll found that 34% believed and 54% did not believe Broaddrick.
The Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll found that 54% believed her and 23%
didn't believe her. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal
explained the difference as due to the fact that the CNN poll used the
word ‘rape’ in its question, while Fox used ‘sexual assault.’ The WSJ's
assessment is plausible, but some of the difference might have been due
to the fact that the polls were done at different times and Broaddrick
had not used the word 'rape' until after the CNN poll but before the Fox
poll. She used the word 'rape' in a widely-viewed television program
and this probably had some impact on the Fox poll.

Bargh, Chen, and Burrows published one of the classic studies on the priming effect in 1996 with the imposing title "Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action."
They found that "participants for whom an elderly stereotype was primed
walked more slowly down the hallway when leaving the experiment than
did control participants, consistent with the content of that
stereotype." On January 18, 2012, Stéphane Doyen et al. published a study on PLoS ONE
that attempted, in part, to replicate the Bargh study. The Doyen group
concluded that while priming motivates behavior, some of the priming
comes from suggestions by the experimenter:

Here,
we present two experiments aimed at replicating the original study.
Despite the use of automated timing methods and a larger sample, our
first experiment failed to show priming. Our second experiment was aimed
at manipulating the beliefs of the experimenters: Half were led to
think that participants would walk slower when primed congruently, and
the other half was led to expect the opposite. Strikingly, we obtained a
walking speed effect, but only when experimenters believed participants
would indeed walk slower. This suggests that both priming and
experimenters' expectations are instrumental in explaining the walking
speed effect.

Daniel Kahneman describes the Bargh
study as follows. They asked students at New York University to put
together four-word sentences from sets of five words. One group was
given words like Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, and wrinkle--words
associated with aging and the elderly. The other group was given
age-neutral words. After constructing their sentences the students were
told to go to another room for another experiment, but the real
experiment was to see how long it took the students to walk from one
room to the other. Bargh et al. predicted that the words with an aura of
elderliness about them would prime the subjects to walk slower than
those who weren't so primed. The researchers found what they were
looking for.

Doyen et al. give a different description of the students' task:

Bargh
et al.'s demonstration involved asking participants to indicate which
word was the odd one out amongst an ensemble of scrambled words a number
of which, when rearranged, form a sentence. Unbeknownst to
participants, the word left out of the sentence was systematically
related to the concept of “being old”.

I've looked at the Bargh study and it isn't clear to me what procedure they used. They describe their procedure thus:

The task consisted of 30 sets of five word combinations.
The participant was instructed to write down a grammatically
correct sentence using only four of the five words given. Participants
were also informed that the task was self-paced. After giving the
instructions, the experimenter left the room so that the participant
could complete the task in privacy.

The Bargh report also lists the elderly nuanced words and explains how they were selected.

In any case, the real issue at this
point in the research is not whether there is a priming effect but what
kinds of things induce it, how powerful are the various influences, and
is there any way to know when we're being motivated to act by priming
factors.

The idea of the priming effect--of the very
idea that our conscious choices, decisions, judgments, and behaviors are
being biased by unconscious factors--is unsettling to many people. Daniel Kahneman writes:

The
main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior
are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of
the moment. Many people find the priming results unbelievable, because
they do not correspond to subjective experience. Many others find the
results upsetting, because they threaten the subjective sense of agency
and autonomy. If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer
can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware
of it, how free are you? Anchoring effects
are threatening in a similar way. You are always aware of the anchor
and even pay attention to it, but you do not know how it guides and
constrains your thinking, because you cannot imagine how you would have
thought if the anchor had been different (or absent).

What
is unsettling is not so much the possibility that all our thoughts and
actions might be determined by factors we have no control over, but that
they might be determined by factors we are unaware of and are
inherently unknowable. It may well be true, as Freud allegedly said,
that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But sometimes a cigar may be a
symbol or stand-in for something else, and the fondling, licking, and
sucking actions of the smoker may represent unconscious desires or
portend future actions. I hesitate to guess what might be represented by
crushing a cigar butt on the pavement with the sole of one's shoe or
the snipping action taken with a cigar cutter while admiring a stick of
tobacco before torching it.

I am sorry to report,
however, that priming your youngster's brain with the music of Mozart
won't make your child more intelligent. The so-called Mozart effect is a hoax.

I'll conclude by referring the reader to an interesting study on priming by Kathleen D. Vohs,
Nicole L. Mead, and Miranda R. Goode entitled "The Psychological Consequences of Money" published in Science (17
November 2006: Vol. 314 no. 5802 pp. 1154-115). The researchers did
several experiments on the priming effects of money. Here's their
abstract:

Money has been said to change people's
motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others
(mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that
money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer
to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to
nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced
helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral
concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work
alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new
acquaintance.

2 comments:

Hey. I think the results of the 'money' experiment are great! Just what society needs these days more self-reliance.

One of the things I have repeatedly noticed and sometimes results in me being a bad party guest is the whole wine-tasting, wine-glasses phenomenon. I know the science behind wine-glasses and affecting how wine hits your tongue is mostly bunk, and there are /some/ differences between wines, obviously. But you read the descriptions on the back, and they talk about hints of this, this and that. And its obvious there is no way anyone is going to drink the wine and be able to make a list like that (despite what wine connoisseurs will tell you). Instead it is almost invariably priming affect. You read about cinnamon hints and then you taste them, or licorice hints. I once tricked my dad into trying a new bottle of wine (he considers himself a wine connoisseur) and asked him if the label was accurate on the back. Both wines listed completely different 'hints' and 'flavours' in their bottles. And he did not notice at all. Not an iron-clad test, obviously, but papers have demonstrate again and again how subjective our senses are, especially taste.